Posted
by
timothyon Saturday June 25, 2011 @04:51AM
from the stay-calm-and-carry-iodine dept.

Coisiche writes "Despite recent events in Japan and the certain public outcry that it will generate, the UK government proposes to build new nuclear power stations. Well, earthquakes and tsunamis are very rare here."

Our electrical companies have been in the private sector since the 80s, apart from the nuclear part which was divided up into two parts: the electrical generation side and the disposal side. Guess which side the taxpayers got to pay for.

Sure we invest in wind farms and tidal generators. I work for a company that has designed and is building a tidal turbine, and I've heard talk about wind energy projects. I still think it's important to continue with nuclear as well. I'm glad that our government doesn't seem as dumb and panicky as certain others.

Parent was just giving you an example.He was asking you to open your mind to other solutions. Of course you could also save energy and since you guys are all buring oil/gas to warm your houses, how about this observation of a small town in the UK:

When I was looking to rent a house in Cheshire a few years ago, a lot of the ads mentioned "double glazed windows" as a selling point. Imagine that! A house with a bit of thermal insulation, in a country where the temperature will often drop to 0 C / 32 F durin

Norway has less than a tenth the population of the UK, approximately similar land area, and a far more significant snowmelt contribution to their precipitation. Hydro works for them in a way that it wouldn't for us.

The UK is committing to heavy use of renewable power in the form of wind turbines, but we are a small island with a huge power demand, we need to follow every avenue that we reasonably can do in power generation.

And we're barely self-sufficient. We would have to be a huge, huge net exporter of power for that to be a viable solution to everyone else. It's the hydro power that's enabled us to be such a big oil and gas export nation, because we haven't needed it ourselves. Sadly that's dwindling away, but we're still in a far better position than most any country for the upcoming oil crisis.

Space isn't the problem. Intermittency is. The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power, or 100% if it were dispatchable. However, wind is very intermittent, and thus cannot be integrated above approximately 20%. You could try to extend this by smart grids, more wide-spread grids, demand-side-management and so on, but you won't get very far.

The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power

Are you sure about that?

According to this [straightdope.com] (scroll down to the list of power sources), building wind turbines in all the locations where they generate sufficient power would produce a grand total of 2.1 terawatts, globally. Which is a lot of power - don't get me wrong, it's totally worth building them to get that energy. But it's nowhere near the 13.5 terawatts needed circa 2002 (the article cites a 2006 paper), or the projected 28-35 terawatts needed by the midcentury (all figures from the same article, feel free to provide counter citations if my source is incorrect or biased).

I don't think we can aim for 80% wind power even if we had the ability to combat intermittency.

With the recent shit storm of FUD out there concerning nuclear power, I am shocked that there isn't a more vocal promotion of building/funding/using thorium salt reactors by the "scientific community". Although no technology is 100% safe, this seems to be the best middle ground when it comes to generating energy while not completely ruining the environment.

The UK has no uranium mining or reserves and thus is completely dependent on imports for its nuclear energy. Though less is known about thorium, it is not listed as having any reserves here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium [wikipedia.org] Particularly given the many many unaddressed problems with making a liquid salt reactor work (the last one never really did) and the huge clean up cost for using that kind of fuel, there does not seem to be any advantage for the UK to adopt thorium.

Thorium is sub-critical unless you use a particle accelerator (expensive) or uranium to kick it off.The other main complicating factor with Thorium, is lack of experience - the Oakridge Reactor did run fine for 4 years, but that was back in the 60's.

WTB: process engineers who are also nuclear physicists......

The chemicals are cheap though, thorium isn't currently useful for much else and its as common as lead.Also unlike uranium it requires only purification not enrichment, so the price should get down to

You present FUD, and your name explains why. Thorium is so abundant, and the molten salt reactor need so little, that fuel availability will be no problem. And if you worry anyway, you can always buy 60 tonnes ($600,000 would be a reasonable price if thorium mining scales up) before you build the reactor. It needs one tonne per gigawatt-year, so that 60 tonnes would last the life-time of the reactor. Also, the liquid salt research reactors has worked very well. You do need to do some design and prototyping

Uranium has been mined in the UK before, it's just not economic at current prices.

But even imports don't mean a significant security of supply issue, as uranium is trivial to stockpile. Plus we have a bucketload of plutonium at Sellafield that nobody seems to know what to do with. That could be made into MOX fuel if necessary.

Anyone that pushed Thorium for safety reasons was thrown out of the industry for daring to suggest that the existing plants were not the safest thing possible. That's what happened in the 1950s and again in the 1990s.India was doing some interesting work with Thorium recently but recent developments there are favouring Uranium reactors that can be tied in to military uses and imported fuel instead.

Finally someone daring to say that the dominant technology might not be the better one.
Sure, it can create weapons grade stock for the military, and due to this focus we have more "experience with it", but that's about it.
Experience is gained through research, but that was canned to "protect" the public by not spreading doubt about dominant tech.
Time to dig out those experimental plans and do some real work for a change.

I for once would like to see a low-pressure, intrinsically safe - self moderating,

Irony much? There are scientific and unscientific minds on both sides of the fence in all these big public "debates". Assuming that you are correct while decrying all research into any ideas you don't agree with is the complete antithesis of science.

A serious understatement. While the UK does have the very occasional tremor, they're so minor that nothing more than a single roof tile has ever moved*. There are no active volcanoes. And hurricanes/tornadoes/etc are extremely rare.

The UK must be one of the best places to build nuclear reactors.

* I'm just assuming this. The point is that they are incredibly minor compared to earthquakes experienced by most other countries.

When it comes to natural disasters in the UK, about the worst we ever get is a bit of flooding and even then, that's just certain regions, there's plenty of places to build a nuclear reactor that would be relatively safe.

Except from terrorist attacks, of course, but we haven't quite pandered to fox news on that one just yet.

Well, you have to admit, the UK does have somewhat of a problem with terrorism, angry Irish who blew stuff up pretty steadily since the invention of gunpowder but have stopped, leaving a gap that has been more than filled by the UK's angry Muslim community. Her Majesty's government has never been afraid of pissing people off which is normally great, but does make nuclear power more complex.

The UK's terrorism problem dropped significantly after September, 2001. Apparently something happened in the USA around then that stopped it being fashionable for people in New York to send money to fund terrorism. With their main supply of funding cut off, there was a much bigger incentive for them to reach a negotiated settlement.

Most of the problem had gone away already in the 1998 Belfast agreement. 9/11 was more the double nails in the coffin, the funding on the one side and the belief in terrorism as a means to provoke political change on the other. The final remnants of the arsenal wasn't destroyed until 2005, but they were just holding on to it at the time. It should also be noted that the IRA struck mainly British armed forces and police officers, even though they had quite a few civilian losses as collateral damage.

It should also be noted that the IRA struck mainly British armed forces and police officers, even though they had quite a few civilian losses as collateral damage.

Which police were the IRA targeting when they planted a bomb outside McDonalds in Warrington on mothers day?Which armed forces were they targeting when they blew up Manchester a few years later?

Tim Parry, aged 12 and Johnathan Ball, a 3 year old toddler, were killed in the American-funded murder in Warrington in 1993.

4 years later Tim Parry's parents shared a platform and shook hands with Gerry Adams.

After a terrible terrorist attack, three people do three things.

Person A: Invades one country, then another, looking for the ring leader. Fails to find him, spends trillions on it.Person B: Sends troops into an ally's country, performs an extra-judicial killing, and buries the body at sea.Person C: Forms a Foundation for Peace, shares a platform and shakes hands with the ring leader.

"Angry Irish" had one of the best fire discipline of all times. They succeeded in bombing stuff that inflicted massive financial pain on Great Britain with minimal cost of lives, which was their entire goal - make the small patch of Ireland cost so much that it isn't worth it at the costs of minimal amount of civilian lives not to actually piss people off to go to a full out war (I'm not talking about special forces torture squads with various power drill fetishes).

It's interesting when you consider that none of the IRA's demands (ie the withdrawal of Britain from Ireland and the establishment of a 32-county Irish republic) were ever met. In fact, British withdrawal is probably further away now than it was when the IRA in its present guise got started in 1969.

I'm wondering what you think the IRA's "modus operandi" is. This is an organization that build napalm-like incendiary bombs and set them off in hotels, restaurants and pubs where civilians gathered in large numbe

This is an organization that build napalm-like incendiary bombs and set them off in hotels, restaurants and pubs where civilians gathered in large numbers. I don't see why you think they would hesitate to attack a nuclear power station or other such facility.

I served in the British Army. When we started using warfare tactics such as full sized all out ambushes rather than just patrolling and playing at being targets, all of a sudden this supposed Irish army who had declared war against the UK decided that this wasn't fair when we went to war footing in some areas instead of policing and complained to the European Courts that we were being too heavy handed!! Err, who was it who said they were an army at war with the UK? The IRA attacked soft targets. Nuclear pow

Nuclear powerstations along with gas storage facilities are well guarded by armed guards.

I wasn't aware of any armed guards at my nuclear power station in Essex back in the 90s. However, there were rumours that if you went for a walk out on the marshes, camouflage vehicles would appear from nowhere containing scary-looking people asking you awkward questions about what you were doing.

I think most of their real political goal have been met actually. That is end of GB's support for unionist paramilitaries, and especially their power-drill fetishist torture squads.

Their modus operandi on England side was very clear: as much damage to corporate and government interests of GB as possible with minimal casualties. Hence, incendiary bombs that cause large scale fires, and warning well before they go off so that there is time to evacuate everyone. And in the end, when they managed to paralyze Lo

Over a third of the people they killed were civilians. About half were military - most of the rest were police and other paramilitary group members. Perhaps in these days of regular drone attacks in Pakistan 33% collateral damage equates to 'the best fire discipline of all times', but it doesn't sound all that great to me.

The IRA destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent civilians with their sick US funded terrorist war, we have the even more vile bin laden to thank for cutting off their funds. There was nothing romantic about them, their main occupation was organised crime and their hobby was shooting the kneecaps off their own people they had dissagreements with. We are fighting hard for a political solution in the UK and listening to driveling idiots like you suggest that bringing back the violence is a great idea beca

Funnily that was one strike that IRA always denied to have been theirs, and if you study the strikes that they did take credit for, this one was very clearly different. Instead of their classic "minimal casualties, maximum damage" doctrine, that one was exact opposite - material damage was fairly low, but casualties very high.

It was in fact often noted that the other side of the North Ireland conflict, Ulster's militias was far more likely to have been behind it to gain more support from Great Britain in it

Which side of the Irish sea? On the Irish side, the conflict was essentially a low key civil war between protestants and catholics. There were no good guys there - just protestant militias with their torture squads, catholic militias with their torture squads, and british army stuck in between those two getting shot at. That's where most of human casualties of the conflict were - three fighting sides and families of militias who often got tortured. Protestant militias were especially famous for having tortu

Your American and don't know what your talking about, the IRA deliberately targeted civilian areas in England and in Northern Ireland. It's aim was to re-integrate Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland through terror. It did play along Catholic and Protestant lines because there are deep social tensions in that area.

The UK armed forces got involved because the police couldn't deal with them as the IRA was robbing banks, blowing people up and had massive ammunition stock piles which were funded by

There is typically a major earthquake, of the sort strong enough to for example demolish Canterbury Cathedral once every 100 years. We also usually have a tsunami about once every 100 years, though we haven't had one now for 300 years. While it is undoubtedly much more stable than most countries, it isn't completely risk free. If for example the volcano on Gran Canaria were to erupt, we would have a 10 meter tsunami flooding most of the west coast of Britain.

Well, you see, there's only one Canterbury Cathedral left. They don't tell you, but there have been ten of them, of which 9 have been demolished by earthquakes. They somehow managed to make everyone believe that those nine cathedrals did never exist. They even managed to erase all traces of those cathedrals, so even archaeologists won't ever find them. This shows you how powerful the nuclear lobby in the UK is.:-)

No, because they weren't all in Canterbury. Every 100 years or so in Britain doesn't mean every 100 years or so in a particular part of Britain. It means once in recorded history in a particular part of Britain.

'Tornadoes', here in the US, are graded on a 5 level scale, from EF0 through EF5.

An EF-0 tornado has winds between 65-85mph(105-135km/h). The strongest tornado to hit the UK in the past 200 years was the equivalent to an EF-2(93 and 130mph). A basic, run of the mill winter storm, has stronger gusts in the UK on a yearly basis. Here in the US, there are residential stick houses that could functionally survive the worst tornado the UK has seen in modern t

What is the UK planning to do about nuclear waste? It cannot be kept in cooling ponds forever. I just watched the intriguing documentary Into Eternity the other day (99p rental on iTunes) about Onkalo, the massive network of tunnels the Finnish are digging in solid bedrock in which will become a giant subterranean depository for the country's nuclear waste. The documentary reminds us that nuclear waste remains harmful for something like 100,000 years, and shockingly they reveal that although Onkalo will be used only for Finnish nuclear waste, the country will need to dig many more Onkalos to handle all of it! What hope is there for countries that are not on a shield of bedrock? Why isn't Canada doing something similar? (Think Canadian Shield.) I recall the US was going to proceed with Yucca Mountain, but Obama slashed the budget that would have funded the work...

The UK reprocesses spent fuel so there's a lot less waste to start off with.

In any case, too much CO2 in the air remains harmful for thousands of years. However, the nuclear waste is all in a concentrated, known location instead of being spread around the world resulting in a global problem.

The UK reprocesses spent fuel so there's a lot less waste to start off with.

Well, we did for a while. Now we're just storing it again.

THORP was closed in 'temporarily' 2005 after a big leak, and due to various problems isn't up and running again yet.

The idea was that it would reprocess spent fuel for other countries for cash, but lost its biggest client (Japan) when it was found that BNFL was faking safety data. So with that and the leak, THORP turned out to be a huge white elephant. It's a shame, but about par for the course for the UK's nuclear power industry.

I'm sorry, you must have misread, they plan on building NEW reactors. You know like the type that could say, run on waste, or the type that generate very little waste at all, our the type that generates waste that remains radioactive for decades not centuries.

Failing that, if the do decide to build a soviet era reactor and shun 40 years of technical progress, the UK has existing very nasty reactors and along with it an existing waste management strategy, be it dump it in the ground, our sell it to someone w

I'm sorry, you must have misread, they plan on building NEW reactors. You know like the type that could say, run on waste

Accelerated Thorium reactors look like they could run on SOME high grade waste such as spent fuel rods from other plants and expired weapon materials - but there hasn't been one designed or built anywhere yet. Nothing else comes close to your dream.

or the type that generate very little waste at all

No such thing unless you redefine "little" to mean whatever you want it to be.

I watched that same documentary, I fully agree it was very interesting and insightful.

However, as naive as this probably sounds, I don't think burying the nuclear waste is the right course of action. As the documentary points out, suitable locations are rare, it's expensive and even Onkalo is no guarantee that future civilisations won't try to dig down far enough to find out what's down there.

I also don't think we should ignore nuclear power, either. It has tremendous benefits and although its very dangerou

Sorry, but the cargo cult only gets you so far before real physics comes in and burns your foot. There is, very obviously, such a thing as nuclear waste and if you had spent your time learning about nuclear power instead of swallowing the crap from clueless PR fools you would know that your suggestion only covers a fraction of the waste.It's this counterproductive and idiotic bullshit that resulted in research on how to deal with nuclear waste getting held up for nearly forty years. Look up synrock and wh

Parent probably means countries where the bedrock isn't close to the surface. In some places, it's more than a mile deep, which isn't going to be very practical.

Most countries have bedrock closer to the surface than that, even if not everywhere. Moreover, mining to more than a mile down isn't too hard, especially if you're not digging through a coal seam (when you would have gas problems). The main issue with deep mines is usually just water ingress, but not all sites have that problem. For example, Boulby [wikipedia.org] (a salt mine) is nearly a mile deep. The only reason we don't normally go down that far is because it's expensive and what we're after is typically closer to the

Westminster aims to recover the power to build nuclear stations in Scotland with the passing of the Scotland bill/Calman commission. We export electricity to England as it is so perhaps the next generation of nuclear stations will be so safe they can be built in Battersea where it's needed.

The map of proposed reactor sites did seem a lot like the list of places as far away from London as possible. I was a bit surprised that there were no proposals in South Wales - we've still got quite a bit of industry that would benefit from local power production here. Battersea looks like an ideal location though. It's on the river, so has a good source of water for cooling, and it's surrounded by large electricity consumers. It was my first thought as a potential site too...

Nuclear power is unavoidable if we want to free ourselves from the oil&gas economy (because it makes us dependent on the Arabs, Iran, and Russia, and that is not a good thing). The windmills and solar panels are not an option. The controlled nuclear synthesis is far far away in time. For the near and not so near future, the nuclear fission is the way.

Actually, wind and geothermal should play a big part of UK (and USA's) energy future. To not, is just plain foolish. However, it would be just as foolish to depend on 100% of them considering that more and more advances are being done in weather control. In fact, all of the western nations should not allow a particular energy source as being more than 1/3, if not 1/4 of the market. For example, bring nukes up to 25% and stop there. Likewise, bring wind up to 25%, and geothermal up to 25%. Finally, the other

We don't have as many earthquakes or tsunamis here as they have in Japan. But we do have exactly the same industry that's immune to public reaction or the liabilities of risk. The US reaction to Fukushima is to make laws to cap nuke plants liability in the event of catastrophe. Which means yet again the power corps (monopolies and cartels) have capitalism for profits, but socialism for losses. This is already true, because nuke plants are uninsurable in the market so the public covers their insurance. But now it's even more starkly true. And what's even more starkly true is that the US nuke government/industry complex is interested in only that "innovation", not in any other changes even when events confront us with the actual risks and damages from these expensive, hazardous boondoggles our Cold War legacy has forced on us.

The technical problems can be patched. The business problems, especially the corruption of a government captured by the industry it regulates, show no sign of any of hope for patch. And that means not even the necessary technical solutions will be applied, when they cost a little profit.

In particular, we need the thorium reactors similar to what Ft. St. Vrain had.
In addition, we really should be working towards SMALL-MEDIUM MANUFACTURED reactors ideally, doing IFR.
With that approach, we can burn up what we have, rather than pay the high costs of storage.

Fact this everyone is in favour of green energy until a windfarm is proposed on the local beauty spot.

There's too many NIMBYs to make wind farms work. They can't generate all the energy we need.

Nuclear is safer than Coal and Gas when you take into account the number of miners and gas workers who have died in accidents over the years. The number of people who have died as a result of Nuclear is in the 60s. Cars kill thousands a year but I don't see many people talking about eliminating those?

There's too many NIMBYs to make wind farms work. They can't generate all the energy we need.

Simple solution: Ban NIMBYs!
Or, cut off the electricity supply of all NIMBYs and inform them that they will now have to generate their own electricity. All that hot air and outrage has to be good for something afterall (generating energy?).:-p

We have the same problem in the US, except both of our major parties are unable to deal with the issue for different reasons. No matter who we choose (the two party system is a statistical certainty given our constitution) we will end up with a government that won't solve this problem. It'll keep getting worse for us until something breaks. I hope it's our constitution (certain provisions regarding apportionment and representation) and not our entire economy and way of life.

It's also worth noting that there was a report published a few months ago showing that wind farms in the UK are only generating about half of the power that the designs said that they were supposed to (around 5% of their peak output). It turns out that the people pushing them were wildly optimistic about their average output.

There are so many assumptions in your question, it is scary. Why assume that a nuclear reactor be damaged by a tsunami or earthquake? What if it were small enough to put on a floating barge? Why not use Thorium?

We as a planet have no real practical alternative to nuclear fission in the short term, while we develop nuclear fusion for the long term. The only alternative is the return to the austerity of the 18th Century. Please can we all just recognise what is staring us in the face; nuclear power is the

Although true, It is also clear that designing for the "100 year disaster" for your area is insufficient when such disasters can result in a 1,000 square kilometers of "can't go there" for multiple tens of years following. (or worse, > 100 year exclusions...).

The number should be chosen such that the steady state quantity of contaminated area will be expected to remain below some agreed-upon acceptable threshold. And obviously, the number should never be less than the expected exclusion term, as then th

This assumes that 1/6th all roofing jobs are solar. This seems quite unrealistic. A crew of two can install solar while a roofing crew is often 10 or more workers. And, much of rooftop solar is going in on flat commercial roofs using cranes to further reduce labor costs. The estimate seem unreliable.

The source you cite gives a range of 18,000 to 50,000 deaths. It predicts 60,000 deaths, but states that this is much greater than the 4,000 that the WHO projects. I'm not sure why their figure is more reliable than the WHO figure.

Over 50 years of nuclear power, the WHO number gives 80 Chernobyl deaths per year. Total nuclear energy production is around 8,283TWh, so that works out at 0.0096 deaths per kWh, just under a quarter of the deaths that they list. If you take the lower bound for the number of

However, the rate of nuclear accidents should be accelerating as we rely more and more on aging power plants. The rooftop solar estimate seems unreliable since it assumes 1/6th of all roofing jobs are solar. A look in the yellowpages comparing roofing with solar companies might give one pause.

A quarter of mill does not hide this kind of information, the fact that you received a donation from nuclear companies might be better. Not that its anything more than coincidence, how does undetected radiation cause deaths within 10 weeks in the US. Maybe if in the next few years we get a 35 percent rise in thyroid cancer this would be remotely plausible.

Several of my friends in the Pacific Northwest USA operate (privately!) scientific instruments to detect radiation levels. They were all watching radiation levels carefully after Fukishima. None of them detected statistically significant changes in background radiation levels at their Oregon or Washington sites. While their instrumentation is not super-sensitive, they detected little or no change.

I am not a doctor, but I know a bit about the effects of radiation. Most of the harmful effects of low lev

As much as I believe that we need to continue doing nukes (and support it), to claim that Fkuushima has zero or hardly any casualties, is just plain wrong. There will be many casualties. That is why older ppl are now going in.